Sean Barrett (Independent)

I would like to respond, briefly, to what the Minister of State said about the views I expressed last week. I thank the Minister of State for that and he is welcome to the Seanad. Before this debate began, we had been saying two Gaeltacht counties, his own and County Meath, had performed splendidly at the weekend. A good atmosphere has been set for the debate.

My points related to section 5. I asked why the Údarás na Gaeltachta (Amendment) Act 2010 is not referred to in the Schedule. There is also the Údarás na Gaeltachta (Amendment) (No.2) Act 1999, which refers to the evaluation committee and the regional committees. Contrary to what the Attorney General said, my legal advice is that a Bill should list all the related legislation affected by it in the Schedule.

It would certainly help parliamentarians to know where we are coming from. When I dug through the previous legislation which is not mentioned in the Schedule, I found that a total U-turn is being attempted, virtually in secrecy because of it not being referred to in the documentation given to Members. Less than two years ago, the Fine Gael Party, including the Minister of State, strongly opposed a two year delay in elections. Now they are choosing a substitute for elections. I can quote what the Minister of State said at that time, and I believed him then, but I do not know what has happened to convert the Fine Gael Party away from the democratic system towards an appointments system.

The time limit, which the Attorney General said does not matter, would still allow us to have democratic elections before 30 September, which is what the 2010 Act said. I would not like us to slip into discussing various ways of nomination and abolishing democratic elections so casually, especially as the Minister of State spoke so strongly in 2010. Senator Buttimer also spoke strongly against deferring the elections and Fine Gael Senators voted against it at that time. If the deferment of democracy by Fianna Fáil two years ago was anathema to the Minister, why is the ending of democracy now his policy? People have said to me that if we were doing this to Travellers, The Irish Times and RTE would be outraged. This is an incredible thing to do to Gaelic speakers. They are being deprived of their language rights. I agree with the Minister of State that regardless of who is appointed, they will not be democratically elected. It may be implicit in this section that those to be appointed will be nice people who have PhDs in Irish but I do not regard that as a substitute for allowing people to be democratically elected, as advocated previously by the Minister of State and the Fine Gael Party in this House. Fianna Fáil was castigated for delaying democracy for two years because it was a bad thing, but we are now being asked to abandon democracy altogether. I will not do that. It is crucial for the survival of our language that it has spoken heirs. We must do nothing to undermine the rights of those heirs.

The Minister of State will be aware that a representative of the Orange Order addressed this House yesterday. He wants the rights of his people to be vindicated. Equally, we should vindicate the rights of Irish language speakers, rather than taking away their voting rights. I believe, on the basis of my reading of the Doherty decision, that those rights are being infringed. The Minister of State will recall the case in question, which was taken when the previous Government postponed the holding of a by-election in his constituency. We have obligations under the Convention on Human Rights. The Minister, Deputy Shatter, is there to vindicate them. We have signed up to international agreements on language rights. It should mean more than the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade getting an extra €400 to buy a nice suit for the person signing an agreement. It is actually supposed to mean something. The speakers of our minority language have language rights, just as the speakers of minority languages in Spain do. If the successors of General Franco were attempting to do to the Basque Country what we are doing to Gaeltacht areas, we would be protesting about it. I ask that we do not slide so readily into a debate on the kind of people we want to replace the democrats.